3 HR Trends to Watch

Recently, we sat down with Dr. Stevie Dawn, the owner and founder of Orange Compass, who works with human resources departments across the country implementing emotional intelligence-based training. She shed some light on three of the most talked-about topics in HR today: Talent acquisition, millennials in the workplace, and succession training.

Talent Acquisition

Dr. Dawn: “At this point, companies can’t afford to make [hiring] mistakes anymore. They have to hire the right people at the right time and that means having people who are specialists in that talent field, so I think [we’re] seeing a lot of HR professionals start to divide into regular, strategic, tactical HR, and talent acquisition. It’s a different mode. You have to be able to read people differently and look at different assessment tools and things like that in the talent field. One of the biggest hot-button issues right now is just finding good talent.”

Dr. Dawn makes a great point: hiring people is much more difficult today than it was 20 years ago. You are looking for talented people that will be a good fit for your organization, and finding the right person means looking at all the individual pieces and putting them together.

Millennials in the Workplace

Dr. Dawn: “There are millennials coming through the ranks that have the skill set, as far as they’ve got the knowledge. They’ve gone to college. We’re making college something more and more people can do, which is awesome. So more and more people are getting a college education and they have those skill sets, but they’re not getting any work experience along the way, which then falls to HR because once they’re hired, who has to train them? The HR department is now having to do more on the job training than they’ve ever had to do before, especially in things like soft skills and how to be a good employee. If they’ve never had a job, they’ve never learned that skill.”

Millennials in the workplace is certainly a hot topic today, and they are entering the workforce in droves. Companies are being forced to adjust to these new employees who are more different from their predecessors than any other generation before them. Empowering millennials with soft skills training is an excellent way to bridge the gap.

Succession Training

Dr. Dawn: “What we’re seeing is a lot of the top level executives at companies are leaving and moving on to another stage of their life and therefore, there are openings at the top but we don’t have a lot of people trained within to handle those kinds of positions. We’ve trained them to do very specific jobs, but we have not trained them to have strategic vision. We have not trained them in critical thinking. And so, can they really manage a huge organization if they’ve only ever managed their one department of 10 people? As organizations, we’ve got to start thinking about succession planning.”

Unprepared successors are an issue businesses have begun to run into as executives retire. To bypass this problem, Dr. Dawn points out that companies need to train the upcoming generation to lead at a larger scale. Empowering employees with a strategic and big picture skill set will make for a much more effective transition to leadership down the line.

To hear Dr. Stevie Dawn’s entire interview and more bits of wisdom, you can listen here.